Walter Sendlmeier

Walter F. Sendlmeier (* 1955 ) is a German linguist and communication scientist and head of the communication science department at the TU Berlin .

Career

After graduating from high school in Hamburg in 1974, Sendlmeier began studying communication research and general and comparative linguistics as well as a minor in psychology in Cologne and Bonn. In 1981, Walter Sendlmeier obtained a master's degree in communication research (Bonn) and received his doctorate in general and comparative linguistics (Bonn) in 1985. In 1991 he completed his habilitation in the field of communication research and phonetics in Bonn.

After completing his master's degree, Sendlmeier was a research assistant in a project on automatic speech recognition funded by the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology . After completing his doctorate, he spent three years as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (Netherlands) with a scholarship for young researchers with a doctorate. During the preparation of the habilitation thesis on the subject of "Speech processing in pathological hearing", Walter Sendlmeier worked as a research assistant in the audiological departments of the ENT University Clinics in Bonn and Cologne.

In 1991 Walter Sendlmeier held a professorship in phonetics at the University of Stuttgart. In 1992 he worked as a senior assistant at the Institute for Communication Research and Phonetics in Bonn. In 1993 he was appointed to a chair for communication science at the TU Berlin . Since then, Walter Sendlmeier has headed the Communication Science department at the Institute for Language and Communication in Faculty I of the Technical University of Berlin

Other activities

Walter Sendlmeier is a member of scientific associations and advisory boards of several specialist societies. He also works as a reviewer for scientific institutions and scientific journals.

He is the editor of the "Oral Communication" series published by Logos Verlag (Berlin). From 1988 to 1996 Walter Sendlmeier was a member of the German Society for Acoustics . In addition, Sendlmeier was one of the founding members of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) in 1991. From 1996 to 2010 Walter Sendlmeier was co-editor of the "Journal for Applied Linguistics". He was a member of the editorial board of the "Journal of Multilingual Communication Disorders". He wrote reports for the German Research Foundation , the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, the journal "Speech Communication", the DAAD and expert reports for the German National Academic Foundation . He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Society for Applied Linguistics for 24 years . From 2002 to 2014 he held a visiting professorship in Milan at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore for the course “Business Communication Germany / Italy” with a focus on “Intercultural Communication”. In addition, Walter Sendlmeier was a member of the advisory board of the " German-speaking Society for Speech and Voice Medicine " in order to promote interdisciplinary cooperation as a non-medical member.

Walter Sendlmeier has given over 70 lectures at national and international specialist congresses so far.

Research priorities

• Verbal communication
• Speech effects research
• Vocal and spoken expression of emotions
• Voice and personality
• Age and voice
• Speech perception
• Speech processing with pathological hearing
• Early stages of language acquisition
• Mental representation of spoken language
• Speech synthesis

Walter Sendlmeiers research focus is in the field of speech impact research . He has developed a methodical triad - consisting of perceptual and acoustic analyzes and their correlations - with which numerous studies have been carried out on the vocal expression of emotional states and different personality traits. The overriding question here is: How do people affect other people based on their voice and manner of speaking? The mass media effects of politicians are also taken into account, as are factors such as age, gender and the attitudes of speakers.

As part of a multi-year research project (funded by the German Research Foundation) on the emotional expression of voice and speech, an emotion database was created ("A database of German emotional speech"), which was spoken by professional actors in a neutral state and in various emotional states. From the more than 800 utterances obtained in this way, around 500 sentences were selected, more than 80 percent of which were recognized as the intended emotions in a listening test and were classified as natural by the listeners. This data collection - also known as the Berlin Emo database - has now been queried a thousand times nationally and internationally. This often happens in the context of developing algorithms for automatic emotion recognition.

Publications (excerpt)

• WF Sendlmeier: The influence of quality and quantity on the perception of stressed vowels in German. In: Phonetica. Volume 38, 1981, pp. 291-308. ( PDF ; 2.42 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier: Psychophonetic aspects of word perception. Buske, Hamburg 1985.
• WF Sendlmeier: Speech cue enhancement in intervocalic stops. In: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics. Volume 3, 1989, pp. 151-161. ( PDF ; 1.28 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier, D. Stock, T. Portele, W. Hess: HADIFIX and P-TRA - two components for speech synthesis. In: Proceedings DAGA 90. Vienna 1990, pp. 1091-1094.
• WF Sendlmeier: Speech processing with pathological hearing. Thieme, Stuttgart / New York 1992.
• TP Goldbeck, WF Sendlmeier: The Relation of Sentence Modality and Word Accent in Certain Intonation Contours. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguistics. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1987, pp. 523-528. ( PDF ; 2.7 MB)
• TP Goldbeck, WF Sendlmeier: Interrelationship between sentence modality and accentuation in the sentence-final position in the realization of intonation contours. In: Intonation research. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1988, pp. 305-321. ( PDF ; 6.11 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier: Perception and mental representation of speech. In: Linguistics. Volume 27, 1989, pp. 381-404. ( PDF ; 2.41 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier: Phonetic-Receptive Aspects of Foreign Language Acquisition . In: Journal for Foreign Language Research. Volume 5, Issue 1, 1994, pp. 26-40. ( PDF ; 6.87 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier: Feature, Phoneme, Syllable or Word: How is Speech Mentally Represented? In: Phonetica. Volume 52, 1995, pp. 131-143. ( PDF ; 4.4 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier (Ed.): Mental Representation of Signs. Special issue of the journal for semiotics. Volume 18, Issue 2–3. Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen 1996.
• G. Klasmeyer, WF Sendlmeier: The classification of different phonation types in emotional and neutral speech. In: Forensic Linguistics, The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Vol. 4, No. 1, 1997, pp. 104-124. University Press, Birmingham. ( PDF ; 13.9 MB)
• A. Paeschke, WF Sendlmeier: The speeches of Rudolf Scharping and Oskar Lafontaine at the party congress of the SPD in November 1995 in Mannheim - a linguistic and phonetic comparison of lecture styles. In: Journal for Applied Linguistics. Volume 27, 1997, pp. 5-39. ( PDF ; 1.19 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier, M. Riebandt: Which Phonetic Features are Available to Cochlear Implant Patients? In: Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics. London 1998, pp. 493-500.
• UM Sendlmeier, WF Sendlmeier: Aspects of early sound acquisition as indicators of later dyslexia. In: Journal for Applied Linguistics. Issue 30, 1999, pp. 5-16. Publisher Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main. ( PDF ; 4.25 MB)
• F. Missaglia, WF Sendlmeier: The Realization of German Vowels by Italian Native Speakers : An Experimental Phonetic Investigation. In: Journal for Foreign Language Research. Volume 10, Issue 1, pp. 73-95. Pedagogical magazine publisher, Berlin 1999. ( PDF ; 3.26 MB)
• A. Paeschke, M. Kienast, WF Sendlmeier: F0-contours in emotional speech. In: Proceedings of the ICPhS. San Francisco 1999, pp. 929-932.
• WF Sendlmeier (Ed.): Speech and Signals - Aspects of Speech Synthesis and Automatic Speech Recognition. Hector, Frankfurt am Main 2000.
• A. Paeschke, WF Sendlmeier: Prosodic Characteristics of Emotional Speech: Measurements of Fundamental Frequency Movements. In: Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Speech and Emotion. Textflow, Belfast, Northern Ireland 2000, pp. 75-80. ( PDF ; 190 KB)
• WF Sendlmeier, G. Klasmeyer: Voice and Emotional States. In: Voice Quality Measurement. Singular, San Diego, CA 2000, pp. 339-357. ( PDF ; 2.88 MB)
• M. Kienast, WF Sendlmeier: Acoustical Analysis Of Spectral And Temporal Changes In Emotional Speech. In: R. Cowie, E. Douglas-Cowie, M. Schroeder (Eds.): Speech and Emotion: proceedings of the ISCA workshop . Newcastle, County Down, Sept. 2000, pp. 92-97, Belfast. ( PDF ; 177 KB)
• F. Burkhardt, A. Paeschke, M. Rolfes, WF Sendlmeier, B. Weiss: A Database of German Emotional Speech. In: Proceedings Interspeech. Lisbon, Portugal 2005. ( PDF ; 203 KB)
• F. Burkhardt, WF Sendlmeier: Verification of Acoustical Correlates of Emotional Speech using Formant Synthesis. In: Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Speech and Emotion. Northern Ireland 2000, pp. 151-156. ( PDF ; 175 KB)
• WF Sendlmeier: Vocal and speaking expression of basic emotions. In: Language and Music. Contributions to the 71st annual conference of the German Society for Speech and Voice Medicine eV Berlin. 12-13 March 1999. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 146–154. ( PDF ; 2.41 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier: The psychological effect of voice and manner of speaking - gender, age, personality, emotion and audiovisual interaction. In: O. Bulgakowa (ed.): Resonance spaces - The voice and the media . Verlag Bertz + Fischer, Berlin 2012. ( PDF ; 184 KB)
• WF Sendlmeier: The audible mirror. In: R. Hüls, M. Schaarschmidt: Hearing Stories. Stories, conversations and poems about hearing: 43-58. Innocentia Verlag, Hamburg 2012. ( PDF ; 1.35 MB)
• WF Sendlmeier: Voice-Emotion-Personality. In: D. Zakharine, N. Meise (Ed.): Electrified Voices. Medial, Socio-Historical and Cultural Aspects of Voice Transfer. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8471-0024-9 , pp. 31-47.
• WF Sendlmeier, I. Steffen, A. Bartels: Pejorative prosody. In: R. Finkbeiner, J. Meibauer, H. Wiese (eds.): Pejoration. John Benjamin Publishing Company, Amsterdam / Philadelphia 2016, pp. 21–41.
• WF Sendlmeier: Speech Effects Research - Basics and Applications of Oral Communication. Logos Verlag, Berlin 2018.

Web links

• Website of the Department of Communication Studies at the TU Berlin
• Publications by Walter F. Sendlmeier

Individual evidence

1. ↑ F. Burkhardt et al: A Database of German Emotional Speech . In: Proceedings Interspeech . Lisbon 2005 ( tu-berlin.de ).